”Well, that was not for charity. He’s terribly good with Bruno. It’s almost uncanny.”
”What are Bruno and he always talking about?”
”I don’t know. They shut up like clams when I come in.”
”I think they’re talking about sex, about girls.”
”Girls? Nigel? Mmmm.”
”Fancy Bruno being interested in sex at his age.”
”A topic of enduring fascination, my dear Adelaide.”
”But he can’t do anything.”
”We all live in a private dream world most of the time. Sex is largely in the mind.”
”I’ve never noticed that you thought it was! I think Nigel knows all about it.”
”About sex? No one knows that, my dear. You have to specialize. I intuit an interesting and unusual specialist in our Nigel.”
”You’d need to be an odd sort of man to want to be a nurse.”
”It’s a very honourable profession, Adelaide.”
”Don’t be silly. Do you think Nigel takes drugs or something?”
”He is a bit mystical. But I doubt it. One has enough creepy-crawlies in one’s mind without positively encouraging them. Nigel has some sense.”
”Well, I’m sure he takes something or other. His face is getting all lopsided.”
”I think Nigel’s rather beautiful.”
”You’re mad. He’s a demon.”
”I rather like demons, actually.”
”He gives me the creeps. I wish he wasn’t here. I’m terrified he’ll guess about us.”
”We’re quite shut off in this part of the house, dear kid. Don’t be so anxious about Nigel. He’s sweet and perfectly harmless.”
”He isn’t. I know him. He’s bad. He’d tell people.”
”Well, it wouldn’t matter.”
”It would. You know I don’t want people to know.”
”All right, kid, all right. Sleepy-byes, sleepy-byes.”
The image of Gwen moved upon Danby’s closed eyes. She was slowly turning her head towards him. Her heavily curled dark brown hair crept on her shoulder, tangled in her cameo brooch. The great-eyed brown glance gathered him into its close attention. “Here comes your old comic relief, Gwen my darling.”
There was another image which sometimes came with sleep and which was terrible. Gwen had been drowned in the Thames. She had jumped off Battersea Bridge to save a small child which had fallen from a barge. The child swam to the shore. Gwen had a heart attack, became unconscious, and drowned. Danby identified her dripping wild-haired body at the mortuary. It was just like Gwen, he told himself over the years, to jump off Battersea Bridge in March to save a child who could swim anyway. It was just the sort of lunatic thing she would do. It was typical. Comic, really.
Adelaide said, “Bruno told me yesterday that spiders existed a hundred million years before flies existed.”
”Mmmmm.”
”But what did the spiders eat?” Danby was asleep, dreaming of Gwen.
3
Nigel, who has been sitting cross-legged on the floor outside Danby’s bedroom, listening in the darkness to Danby and Adelaide talking together, rises silently, elegantly, his legs still crossed. There is nothing more now to be heard within except a counterpoint of snores. He glides up the stairs to his own room, enters, and secures the door.
It is dark in the room. The door is locked, the curtains thick as fur. Deep somewhere in the darkness a single candle is burning. Nigel in black shirt, black tights, rotates without stretched arms. The furniture against the wall is sleek and flat. The brown walls fold away into receding arcs about the glimmering sphere where Nigel turns and turns, thin as a needle, thin as a straight line, narrow as a slitlet through which a steely blinding light attempts to issue forth into the fuzzy world.
Concentric universe. Faster and faster now sphere within sphere revolves and sings. The holy city turns within the ring-of equatorial emerald, within the ring of milky way of pearl, within the lacticogalactic wheel, the galaxy of galaxies, that spins motionless upon a point extensionless. The flake of rust, the speck of dust, the invisible slit in the skin through which it all sinks down and runs away.
The candle has grown into a huge luminous cylinder made of alabaster or coconut ice. It glows palely from within and impulsates and breathes. Nigel has fallen upon his knees. Kneeling upright he sways to its noiseless rhythm song. In the beginning was Om, Omphalos, Om Phallos, black undivided round devoid of consciousness or self. Out of the dreamless womb time creeps in the moment which is no beginning at the end which is no end. Time is the crack. Darkness upon darkness moving, awareness slides from being. Vibrations clap their wings and there is sound. An eye regards an eye and there is light.
In the dimness he is squatting huge and blocks the sky. Little hands vibrate like hairs but he squats huge and broods on self. His idly stirring foot may crush a million million while he scratches, fidgets, brushes away a myriad buzz of littlenesses whose millennia of shrieking are to him the momentary humming of a gnat which between two fingers he idly crushes as he squats still and broods on self.
The humming light is waxing, the mountainous black is waning, the screaming is swelling into a harmony, a dazzling circlet of visible sound. Two indistinct and terrible angels encircle the earth, embracing, enlacing, tumbling through circular space, both oned and oneing in magnetic joy. Love and Death, pursuing and pursued.
The sounds diminish and in the empty pallid azure the golden quoit spins away. At last, it has become a spot of radiance, a stain of gold, a fading flash, a laser beam, a single blinding point of light which absorbs all light into itself. The colourless soundless silence vibrates and sways. He is near. Nigel trembles pants and shudders. His wide-open eyes see nothing, he, Nigel, the all-seer, the priest, the slave of the god. Time and space crumple slowly. He is near, He is near, He is near. They fold and crumple. Love is death. All is one.
Nigel clutches his heart. He gasps, he groans, he reels. He falls forward on his face on the ground, his forehead strikes the floor. His eyes are screwed together against the glaring dark. The presence is agony, punishment, stripes, the extended being tortured into a single point. Annihilation. All is one.
Later, far away in another world, an old man calls out, calls out, then weeps alone in the dark slow hours of the night. With magnified precision Nigel hears the calling and the weeping. He lies prostrate upon the floor of the world.
4
“Our lodger’s such a nice young man, Such a nice young man is he”
Danby, singing, aimed a friendly smack at Nigel’s backside. Nigel tossed his long dark hair and lowered his eyes and left the room with a spiritual smile.
Bruno said, “Danby, I am going to summon Miles.”
”Oh Lord!”
Bruno was sitting propped up in bed. The whitish counter pane was covered with a polychrome scattering of stamps.
On top of these lay an open copy of Gerhardt’s Neue Untersuchungen zur Sexualbiologie der Spinnen. Bruno felt clearer in the head today. His legs ached and ached; but that sickening point of malaise in the middle of his being, that possibility of awful pain, had dimmed to nothing. He just felt almost agree ably limp and weak. He had had a long relaxing conversation on the telephone with the weather-report man, who had been reassuring about the possibility of the Thames flooding. These conversations with polite impersonal official voices soothed Bruno’s nerves. He felt he was a voice himself, a disembodied citizen. After that he had had some excellent wrong numbers. It was necessary to talk to Miles. He would talk to his son about ordinary indifferent things, about the printing works, about Miles’s job, about Danby’s kindness, about Nigel’s skill. They would talk and talk, and the room would grow dimmer, and then by some quiet scarcely notable transition they would be speaking the names of the women, Parvati, Janie, Maureen, in grave relaxed sadness together contemplating these conjured shades. Miles would be a little formal at first, but as he listened to Bruno’s voice, naming the women, speaking of them with humility and simplicity, he would bow his head and then look upon his father with great gentleness and the room would be filled with an aura of reconciliation and healing. Earlier and alone, repeating to himself the words “reconciliation and healing,” Bruno had found tears in his eyes. He wept so easily now. Any story in the newspaper about a lost dog or cat could bring tears to his eyes. Even something about the Royal Family could do it.